Imagine your idea of hell,
only smaller, and tapping against your days
like a branch at a window all night in winter.

Only it’s autumn, just.
Whatever happened to summer
it’s over, and though I’ve arranged

a few entertainments -
a party, a wedding -
it’s hard to erase

the image of the man
who lived his whole life
in my father’s form

gasping for three days
beneath a plastic mask,
his whole body shoring

its last energies against the microbic assault
with all the panic of birth,
and losing.

The mask fitted over nose and mouth,
clear as glass so we could look
straight down the abyss if we chose -

that’s the window.
And the futile heaving of his chest
for three days and nights -

that’s the branch
tapping out its code: you’re next.

But it’s autumn, and I’m standing
on the slab of slate that makes up
our front step, holding six pears,

windfall I collected
before I mowed the neglected lawn.
Three in each hand, their globes nestling

in the cups my palms make,
necks peeking out from between my fingers
like small birds, or children

begging for food, to be held.
I was ready to set them on the counter,
hoping by the weekend to be let go

from the double-fisted grip of grief
and indifference. To put them up
for winter, as I’ve done in other years.

But I heard the geese calling, sailing
over the house and yards in near darkness,
like Synge’s inscrutable women

at dusk, keening.
So I came back outside to listen.
And remembered that woman’s poem

about geese, the message of permission
and hope she said she heard.
If I hear anything in their call

it’s not translatable. I see them,
dimly, in a break between
black shoulders of trees,

like dust, scattering across the charcoal sky,
looking for somewhere to overnight
before rain, and winter.

Categories: Poems
No Comments »